Women, eh? What a nightmare. Can't live with them. Can't get them to vote properly. Even if you marry them! This appears to be the extent of the deep strategic thinking at the top of political parties. The women's vote is hard to locate apparently. So we have this incessant fumbling. Sweet nothings are whispered in our ears by people who don't remember our names.

Do we feel taken for granted? Yes. Do we feel patronised? Certainly. Are we there yet? 'Fraid not.

The battle of the wives - the increasing focus on Samantha Cameron and Sarah Brown as guarantors of the goodness of their husbands - is just more clumsy fooling around. Since when did 'Hello I've got a policy' morph into 'Hello I married someone nice'?

Battle of the wives: Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron are being deployed as guarantors of their husbands' goodness

We may well be curious as to what our leaders are really like but I can think of no other job where someone's spouse has to trot out these artificially sweetened lines about them in order for them to be employed. Gordon is Sarah's hero. David has never let Sam down. This is politics reduced to greeting-card sentiments. The Election, though, is not a competition of niceness, which is precisely why Brown is catching up in the polls.

The spectacle of strong-willed women mooning about their men looks
like a sickly throwback. The fuss over the way Samantha Cameron votes
could only have been made by those who don't expect women to have minds
of their own, and the Tories who want to rebut this notion are showing
their true colours here. I would only care what Sam Cameron's views
were if she were running for office. But she isn't.

This
surrendered wife lark is but one of the ways in which this Election
feels like a step back instead of forward. The televised debates
between the party leaders are seen as a new approach but will actually
be a discussion among six white middle-aged men: the three leaders and
the three chosen presenters.

At a time when so many are
completely disengaged from the political process, the idea that the
diversity of this country may be represented in any way at all remains
a fantasy. It is simple: we need more of a mix not because women vote
for women but because our elected representatives should be
representative. If we move at the current pace we won't have 50 per
cent female MPs till 2065. But the thing that divides female voters is
the same as the thing that divides males: class. Strangely, this is now
a taboo subject so politicians faff around.

Brown wants
'middle-class mainstream mums'. (He can have them.) Both parties are
desperate for the savvy and well-heeled Mumsnet brigade, but actually
the female vote that Labour has lost is that of working-class women.
There is a silence about the working class as if they are an
embarrassment. Certainly, though, many women are not relating to the
career-driven, dual-income rhetoric of much of Labour. It's not that
these women don't work, of course they do, but often in part-time and
minimum-wage jobs. Such women will be hit particularly hard by
public-sector cuts as many are both users and workers within it.

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Yet
Brown prefers to focus on the middle-classes who he claims will also be
affected by Tory cuts. Until fairly recently Cameron had this crew
behind him as he has played on the anxieties of many parents. From
chocolate oranges to the sexualisation of girls, Cameron has made
caring noises about many of the issues parents chat about in the
playground. The Tory analysis of Broken Britain also fuelled
middle-class fears about the whole nation going to the dogs. But
Cameron has had to pull back from such pessimism because he has to come
up with a solution that doesn't involve more money. And there is none,
well none to address such gross structural inequalities.

Such
an issue is gender neutral. We all know we are in a financial mess.
Caring about services, schools and hospitals is not the prerogative of
mums any more than it is of dads. At the moment we are being asked to
vote on the basis of two things only: effective management of cuts and
the character issue. Women are no different to men in recognising that,
so stop treating us as though we are.

You're not making art, Lady Gaga - just adverts

But in real life (I mean in videos) she adds up to less than the sum of her parts.

The
music is mundane pop. Her outfits look merely exhausting. The 'shock'
of seeing her with a telephone on her head, in very tall shoes
professionally gyrating, is not seismic.

She works hard for the
money. And clearly needs more as her latest video Telephone is really a
promo for various products from Diet Coke to mobile phones.

Gaga may claim she is making art. She is actually making adverts.

Show us you're different, Nick

I am waiting for a sign. That I am a Lib Dem.

I mean, how do you know? I was one once for about a day at their conference, but after the second day of muddle I gave up.

Now,
though, it is important to know what they stand for as they may hold
the balance of power. Are they best placed, for instance, to argue that
we pull out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later?

Yet Nick
Clegg is holding the cards deliberately close to his chest, saying his
party will not form a coalition. Does anyone believe this? And does
anyone believe that his party is not closer to Labour than it is the
Tories? Nothing has been made clearer by the god-awful slogan 'Change
that works for you. Building a fairer Britain'.

I suppose it at
least captures an essential Lib Dem vagueness. Yet they opposed the war
in Iraq, they want a different system of government and they have got
Vince Cable, so they should surely prepare for power by making the most
of their differences from the other parties instead of mimicking them.
This is not the time to play it safe.

A real drink issue

Goodness!
I don't know too much about Mark Owen but surely he must be in a bad
way with his drinking if he's having help from Robbie Williams?